New York — The designer’s brother, Kenneth Cole, said he was vindicated Monday by a federal appeals court decision overturning his criminal fraud conviction.
Neil Cole said he has been fighting for more than a decade to clear his name after federal authorities alleged he committed securities fraud while running Iconix Brand Group Inc., the company he founded that has partnered with some of the biggest names in entertainment, including Madonna, Jay-Z and Pharrell Williams.
“It’s great,” Cole said in a phone interview about the written decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan.
Cole said one of the first people he spoke to after the appeals court ruling was New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo, whose sister is married to Kenneth Cole.
“I was really hoping to work with Andrew on the mayoral campaign,” Cole said, though he kept his distance from the former governor, a Democrat, before an appeals court overturned his conviction.
Cole described what the government and the pressures his friends had been subjected to over the past 11 years as “truly horrific.”
“I lost a lot of friends. It was kind of the same for me too. I got divorced,” he said. “Everyone was uncomfortable talking to me.”
But he said his world had already brightened as he had been sent 100 text messages, many from “people I haven’t heard from in years”.
He said that he expects to announce within weeks plans to start a new project that may be different from the type of company he started before.
“I see a new way to do this,” he said.
Cole said he was not surprised by the legal outcome because the three judges on the appeals panel seemed to agree that the government was wrong when they heard oral arguments earlier this year.
The Second Circuit agreed with Cole that his 2021 acquittal on the conspiracy charge meant that his 2022 conviction on related charges should be overturned on double jeopardy grounds. The double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment prohibits being tried twice for the same crime.
“The record shows that the second trial was substantially a repeat of the first trial,” the appeals court wrote, saying the government once again sought to prove Cole’s involvement in an illicit scheme in which he inflated and falsely reported Iconix’s revenues.
Cole did not have to serve any of the 18-month prison sentence because it was suspended during the appeal. He was also ordered to forfeit $790,200.
Iconix Brand, founded in 2005, was a high-flying company valued at more than $3 billion that established itself as the second-largest U.S. licensor after Walt Disney Co. before it was later pursued by the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors.
Iconix’s stock price collapsed from $40 per share to less than a dollar. It was sold in 2021 to a private equity firm for $585 million.
A message sent to the US Department of Justice for comment was not immediately responded to.